MIT Hacks XKCD Talk With AACS key

Reader Hanji alerts us to a hack pulled off when Randall Munroe, author of the popular webcomic XKCD, spoke at MIT by invitation of the Lab for Computer Science. MIT hackers dropped hundreds of labelled playpen balls onto the audience from hatches in the ceiling. The labels bore XKCD's logo as well as the recently discovered 16-byte AACS processing key. At another point in Munroe's talk he was stalked by remote-controlled mechanical velociraptors; but fortunately he had been supplied with a squirt gun full of grape juice.

Comments

thats better than

[evwah]

thats better than being stalked by remotely controlled mechanical MPAA lawyers

Re:thats better than

[Kryptonian Jor-El]

Can you imagine the cease and desist letter from the MPAA?
"We demand that all AACS keys are removed from all PLAYGROUND BALLS immediately and no legal action will follow"

Re:thats better than

[flyingfsck]

Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball!

Americans demand tougher sentencing for hackers!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask a liberal to define the word "hacker" and he would probably give you a rose-tinted answer. To the liberal, a hacker is a harmless tinkerer. It's unlikely that a FBI agent would agree; nor would anybody who has to commute by air, drive a car, raise a family or pay their taxes.

All sensible patriots should demand that these atheist hackers are sent to prison. (At the very least, they are suspicious and should be reported to the FBI for going to a "technology" college instead of Bob Jones University!!). I have a modest proposal to go further than the sober ideas presented in that beatiful and well researched article: those who have inflicted cyberterrorism on our great nation by illegally watching HDDVDS should be given the death penalty. This is the only way we can live through these troublesome times, when the rapture is near, without losing to inferior and dangerous communist computing products.

one of my favs,

[Adult film producer]

http://xkcd.com/c202.html

Re:one of my favs,

[networkBoy]

FWIW I'd never heard of this comic before today.
I just finished reading it all.
awesome
hooked
am I
-nB

Re:Wow!

[gad_zuki!]

Yeah arent college pranks supposed to be stuff of legend?

"Lets drop some things and then set our overpriced RC toys at him!"

"Genius!"

"Yep, we're MIT students!"

So that's what Randall Munroe looks like

[daranz]

For some reason, I expected him to be really thin, and wearing a black hat.

tags: encryption, humour

[Anonymous Coward]

how odd we don't see the two tags together more often

Re:tags: encryption, humour

[natrius]

You don't see them because the humor tag is usually encrypted in another one, like "itsatrap".

A squirt gun?

[Spazntwich]

Pfft, everyone velociraptors fear nothing besides traffic cones.

Re:it's

[blackicye]

It's a little late to be jumping on the spread-the-AACS-key bandwagon, isn't it?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Not if you realize how hard is it to write "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" on thousands of playground balls and them load them into chutes in the ceiling!

Re:enough already!

[Russ Nelson]

You must be attending Clarkson!

Re:Americans demand tougher sentencing for hackers

[ravenshrike]

Well, to be perfectly precise, that's all a real hacker is. But those who released the key were crackers. Not to be confused with the fucking hilarious racial epithet.

come on, I know you're out there...

[Zackbass]

LSC..

Re:come on, I know you're out there...

[Harvey]

... sucks!

Obligatory

[ZombieRoboNinja]

And they've been told many times that crypto will always fail in finite time when Eve is given the ciphertext, the plaintext, and the key.

Obligatory XKCD.

Re:Don't miss..

[networkBoy]

son of a bitch.
starting over
am I
-nB